Big Enough

Talking about my grandfather is like speaking with a mouth full of razor blades. It would be best to keep my mouth shut and still, cheating the blades of their sharpness and the ability to do damage. Instead the story comes out in red torrents and little slices of pain that make the language too difficult, the story too impossible to tell. To relate all of it, everything that happened between us, would require that I bleed to death.
But not everything has to be told, does it? There is enough left to the imagination in telling a story that the pictures paint themselves, the images move and speak until you lose the sound of my voice, you pick up the objects in my room or in his, smell the air and run your hands over the sheets.
You can forget for a moment that this is not your story at all, that someone else is telling it and you start to feel that this might be happening to you. You worry over what happens next, dread what is coming. But you already know what is going to happen. You are powerless to stop it, but you can stop the story, end this telling of it and go to another room, start dinner, or go for a walk. I am stuck in here, in my memory, caught by the sound of my own voice while the scene plays over and over, a scratched and grainy recording of what really happened, an artless video with the details etched into my memory and now hinted at in yours.
This is why I tell you this much to begin with. This is what we share. An overlapping of experience that once told neither of us can escape. You are brought here as a witness and I am no longer stuck in this loop alone.
My grandfather hated the color yellow. He spat the word like a curse, an invective against daisies and cheese, the neighbor’s canary colored boat. I stared after his gaze; both of us unable to tear our eyes from the offending color and both of us trying to unravel its mystery, as if by solving the color yellow we could solve the problem of who he was. We could be saved from the destructive force that was his nature. Eventually we each caved into the pain of staring too long at a hated thing and the habit of his terror took me into his house, his room again.
There is a rhythm and form to even the most egregious pain and I took comfort in the sameness of atrocities that occurred in the small spaces we occupied. Even chaos has a pattern, scientists say, and nature erects beauty in the fractured web of living, the devastation of life lived at the mercy of the elements. Held in time and space by the gravity that was my grandfather’s dementia I found myself patterned after the chaos of universal design, his violence and my trajectory through it creating a simple and random order that became our own, savage seasons. We marked our lives by the passing of each one, relieved to be through the most violent of cycles and resting again when the gentler moments caught us staring through the window and watching for the coming of yellow, a symbol as chaotically beautiful as it was hateful for us both.
I try to imagine the forces working to create a man like my grandfather. I picture warring gods and titanic storms erupting and battling to form the man from the most violent of landscapes. I often think of him rising up from clay, streaked red by the spilling of mythological blood while rage sparked from him like great electrical storms that could find no ground, no place for their fury to dissipate. I became a lightning rod for his kinetic rage, the sand fusing beneath my feet whenever he turned his attention to me. There is danger in a man who smells of lightning and I learned to walk on glass, associating the odor of ozone with my grandfather’s touch.
But he was nothing more than flesh and bone. Like me he could bleed, falling down drunk so often and breaking open I understood that despite his power over me he was vulnerable. I hoarded the secret of his frailty to myself against the day when I would use it dismantle the skin, sinew, tissue and blood that defined him.
I imagined fashioning weapons from the clutter of his house, using the fabric of ordinary objects to tear him into unrecognizable pieces, each one just a tile against an already unsteady mosaic of whisky bottles, ashes, and newspapers. He would dissolve and dissipate into the room, too small and broken to recollect enough to even form my name. I whispered abominable prayers for the strength to kill him, to be big enough to return him to the dirt and stones of the earth.
At the age of ten everything is bigger than you. My grandfather loomed over me so large I played always in his shadow and no matter how fast or far I ran from him, his black, wavering ghost arced over me, blocking out the sun and carrying back to him the secret of my hiding. He was constantly in my periphery and even when I had my back to him I could feel him reaching for me from another room, outside the door or across the hall. His drinking built its own consciousness and rattled my name against the back of my neck, a tapping and summoning I could not resist or shut out. His drinking built and called louder, more incessantly until I was forced to turn and walk towards him, facing finally the direction of annihilation.
I could not stand up to my grandfather. I might argue that I was too young, too small, and too afraid to do anything to preserve myself but there is truth to the idea that I flung myself headlong into him, opening my mouth and swallowing down the fear and pain. I raced after him and caught his gaze, chasing without ceasing his most repulsive behavior.
I was ten. I was of a size and shape that everything held sway over me, over my imagination. I knelt in the spare room playing with rusted tools, testing the heft this piece, the edge of that one. I imagined standing up tall and powerful, a tool in each hand that transformed into a weapon of devastating consequence that would free me not only of my grandfather’s torture, but also of my acquiescence to it. And this is the brutal crux of my behavior. I am culpable. I race over the ground, the memory with infinite attention to detail looking for clues to my rebellion and finding none. I sit motionless in the room until I feel his eyes on my back and the sound of his breathing rolls towards me like a fear and longing I will not resist.
The room bears little but witness. Cool green tiles on the floor I know by heart, know the measured steps, the number of tiles he must cross before he reaches me on this stained and rotting mattress. The room and I are blood sisters, held together over time by the memory of all that happened there, as if the room was as sentient as I and the rape, the bloodletting leaving a psychic impression on her walls the way the coke bottle left torn tissue and permanent scars on mine.
So I count. At 27 he will be here and the tip of his leather slipper will rest against the edge of the mattress. I close my eyes feigning sleep at the last minute but he has already seen my appraisals of him, the room, watched my counting of the tiles. Sometimes he even helps, ticking off the numbers out loud, taunting me with the steady rise of his voice, knowing that as he approaches 27 my time has run out and once again I have given in to his game, absolving his guilt by my own inability to move. We each wait silently for a moment as if there is a sacredness to all this and perhaps there is. By creating ritual and habit we give it a profane and religious order, the comfort of a patterned brutality freeing us from the sins of random savagery. I even bow my head as he places his hand on me and says that I am his “good girl”, a mock prayer and a request as he stoops and pulls off my shorts, my shirt, my underwear, my little pieces of armor.
Naked before my grandfather I am ten. Nothing more. Stripped to the bone of identity, consciousness and prayer I am sublimate to his desire and cruelty. We are both less than animals now, as he grunts and sweats over me, as I scream and beg, finding the sound of my voice remarkable, as if I am hearing it from a distance and am trying to decipher its source. Even now I view these acts with a sense of detachment and watch our tryst with a scientific eye, tracing the patterns of events from that room to the adaptive behaviors of my life as it is now. It is a survival of the fittest and I have changed my coloring, my eating habits my needs based upon the requirements of my grandfather’s hostile environment and the ferocious, formative elements of pain and danger.
In this loop of memory I view the scene without ending while some frames distill and float to the forefront like symbols or images painted on a cave wall. They have become the dead language of my childhood, a story, painted in blood and without words, the means of my own survival. I place my hand over the handprint paused in memory and I resurrect my own folktale, a weaving of fear, religion and madness into lyrical sensibility by a living language designed to decode the secrets carried by adults and passed on to their children in the forms of mythologies of “that never happened”. I carry on my body the marks of sacrifice and silence, of a voice never raised in defense, one that never cautioned or told me the story of my grandfather, of his destructiveness and his devastation. I carry on me the history of what never should have been and I translate the ropes of scars as metaphor and story to ensure that the lesson of who I am is not lost to time, memory or silence. I tell stories to remember and to reverence the ten year old, to go back and forgive the immobility, the fragility and the smallness that allowed her suffering and her seduction. It was that too, you know. There is a seductive quality to pain that once it establishes a pathway in the body it becomes a riveting reminder of time and place, of skin and bone, a recollection of the real. I loved and hated the very worst of it, validating me in a way that love could not. I was in love with the scent of my own blood.
This is a confessional as all stories are confessionals. I tell you this to absolve myself and to unfuse the past from the present. Telling a story frees you from the power of it and passes it into another plane, to another person. It is a way of dismantling my grandfather, telling this over and over, to reader after reader until he is dissipated among the thousands, unable to rejoin himself again in either body or memory, smaller and smaller until he dwindles from sight, a specter of chalk on the wall of a cave, released with a puff of air.

Like dodging a freight train 200 yards wide

at it's widest, the tornado was 200 yards wide.

i had been lying in bed reading when the EBS warning went off. i ignored it. they run so many tests i think of them as static. then the lights dimmed, flashed, and went out. i heard a strange popping noise and went to the window to see what was happening. i looked for the skyline but it was not there. i wondered why i could see large objects rotating at eye level. i live on the third floor. something slammed into the glass and it shook me out of my daze. i was staring eye to eye with a freight train. it was heading straight for the building.

there was a moment when i thought that i was at the end of it. i only had about thirty seconds to figure out what was going on and what to do. zero warning. it was really the incredible roar and tremble that motivated me. i grabbed gertie as debris started slamming against the window. the curtains were sucked against the glass like they were in a vacuum. very bad sign. as i ran for the hallway with gertie, i felt the impact and the entire building began to vibrate and concrete dust began raining down. i could hear the roof begin to groan under the pressure and strain, as we are on the top floor. i could not get to the basement in time, not even to the second floor as the elevator was out and the stairs are at the far end of the building from me. i just sat down and held gertie and waited for the roof to cave in. i think i was crying. i know i was screaming, even though i could not hear myself over the roar and the breakage. i was hoarse for two days. and then it suddenly stopped. just amazing silence, then little noises creeping into your awareness: the sift and creak of concrete falling and settling, small groans and moans of people creeping out of their hiding places to check that they are still alive, unharmed. then we all began to check on each other and made a silent journey down the stairs to survey the damage and make sure that we did not suffer some aftermath tragedy where the roof gave way after the tornado passed. all in all, three days without electricity, some smashed windows and minor roof damage, we are all fine and well, if not a tiny bit traumatized.s o i cannot begin to understand what the people in the cotton mill lofts must be feeling, as they look across the way and the only other loft building to take such a direct hit is still standing, barely scathed and intact. they must be devastated to have to pull themselves from the wreckage one more time (it burned down in 1999). the pictures do not do justice to the damage. an entire section collapsed, pancake fashion, all five floors. no one was there at the time, a fairly large miracle. i would not be surprised to see all, or at least part, of the structure condemned. i am grateful and guilty at the same time.
i finally suffered a bit of post traumatic disorder on the one week anniversary of the tornado. i had a small emotional melt down, but i think i needed it. i just carried on normally all week, making jokes. then, it didn't feel funny or normal anymore. i kept remembering that moment when i thought gertie and i were going to be buried in tons of concrete and steel. and i wished i could let leslie know i was sorry. sorry i had not called her one last time, sorry i stayed here while she went to minnesota. it seemed like a good idea at the time, though, didn't it? that was the toughest part, thinking abour her in those last seconds. and then you feel foolish because, well, nothing happened, really. not even a scrape or a bump. and all she could do was be terrified from 1100 miles away upon hearing and watching the news. so i am happy to be here. glad to be writing this instead of being a statistic. it could have been much worse. it felt like it was, for a moment or two. this is sweeter, by far. to be doing this instead of doing nothing, being nothing. to be given a chance to make another phone call or two and change my mind about a few things. and i have. i intend to be a little less anonymous and take a chance or two. after all, it isn't every day you can fall under the wheels of a freight train 200 yards wide and live to tell the tale. intact, whole and in love again
xoxo,
peg